Studio IMAGE | BA Major in Art

Both enthusiasm and skepticism about technological developments have always been a powerful driving force of cultural discourse and practice. The question of how far artists can not only be inspired or repelled by technological developments but can also contribute to current social discourses has been discussed recently in numerous events, such as the symposium “Guest, Ghost, Host: Machine!” organized by Hans Ulrich Obrist and John Brockman (Serpentine Marathon, 2017). How do we individually as well as a society relate to technological progress? Will “culture surrender to technology” as claimed by Neil Postman in his publication Technopoly in 1992? Or will we be able to regulate technology’s implications to prevent our societies from becoming “totalitarian technocracies”? Are social inclusion, human fallibility and the capability to abstract the key factors that prevent AI from ever becoming as intelligent as a human being? How does technology perceive the world and at the same time change the ways we see it? And most importantly: which contribution can we, as artists, make to all of this?
The Studio Image Project ELIZA & Frankenstein. Techtopian Image Narratives offered the opportunity to intensively research into the thought and image world of technological utopias and dystopias. Through the lens of diverse topics, we investigated how art processes can set in motion, subvert and transform social, political and media discourses. Historical and contemporary image strategies, intense theoretical explorations, a film program and discussions with invited artists and curators supplied inputs as participants developed their own artistic ideas and concepts. In the course of the semester students realised these in a photographic and/or video-based project for the exhibition space as well as in the form of an individual artist’s publication.

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